Hope Floats

The ordinariness of the material gives way to the winning personalities of the stars.

This is a frustrating film that takes its cutesy title way too literally.

An insipid, stillborn drama that drags its viewers through a ghetto of despair before finally, unexpectedly plopping them down in the midst of a happy ending.

Cloying, unoriginal stuff, rescued -- barely -- by the easy affection that courses between Bullock and Connick Jr., and by the lovely cinematography of Caleb Deschanel.

Director Forest Whitaker, who appears to have been typed as a female-friendly director in the wake of "Waitinh to Exhale's" runaway success, drags out the already painfully slow proceedings with syrupy dissolves, slo-mo sequences and redundant flashbacks, underscoring it all with an intrusively obvious country soundtrack that matches lyrics to emotions with cringe-inducing exactness.

If there's one thing more heartbreaking than a crying child, it's a crying child wearing thick glasses, an image exploited numerous times throughout the course of the dull, uninvolving, tissue-thin Hope Floats.

Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions.